What is AirTight Management?

AirTight Management is the first ever comprehensive framework for all the management systems a small to medium size business (“SMB” from 15 to 999 employees) needs to run and grow their company. The AirTight Six Systems move a company from “seat of the pants” entrepreneurship to professional management best practices. They allow scaling and market share dominating performance. Using these Systems properly will likely make your company a market leader within a few years because so few companies do even a few of these six things well. Doing them all well will put you in the top 5% of companies in the world.

Each of the AirTight Six Systems can be installed individually, or in any combination based on your timeframe, needs and budget. Your specific situation will determine the order we recommend to implement each System for greatest impact.

AirTight incorporates hundreds of the best and timeless ideas and practices from the top management gurus of the last 75 years distilled into a single trainable framework. These ideas and practices have been extracted from hundreds of the best business books of all time from authors like:Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Michael Porter, Geoffrey Moore, Clayton Christensen, Tom Peters, Jack Welch and over a hundred others. This distillation of best practices used well will make your company a world-class leader in its field....

A good Strategic Planning System also includes a “cadence” and processes to improve communications to all levels in the organization on key priorities and integrate that plan into operations. This increases productivity and morale and reduces waste, stress and friction.

Strategic Planning empowers managers to lead, not depend on the C-Level for every decision, growing their abilities, job fulfillment and creating a winning psychology to empower employees.

Strategic Plans creates higher “differentiation” which drives better profitability, lower selling and marketing costs and a niche focus to be the best, a leader not follower, in a market....

Benefits of AirTight Management Best Practices System #2

PAMS is short for “Performance, Accountability and Merit System”. PAMS creates a high-performance culture by using hundreds of proven best practices in management and leadership. We call this culture a “Darwinian Meritocracy” because it evolves and adjusts based on all situational factors internally and externally.

PAMS incorporates hundreds of the best ideas and proven management techniques from hundreds of books and management gurus of the last 75+ years to create high-performance team and superior results so you don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” or read 300+ books like our founder did to develop AirTight Management.

PAMS includes training in the five styles of management every professional manager needs to know and use to maximize productivity, results and each employee’s individual performance. Executive coaching can also accelerate manager development with high ROI when appropriate.

Just one of the subsystems we teach has been proven by research to increase corporate value creation by 56% compounded annually on average!

PAMS provides a development career path for your best employees, reduces politics, increases trust and focus to drive more revenue and net profit....

Benefits of AirTight Dashboards & Metrics- System #3

Dashboards allow a business to be “run by the numbers” freeing up management to work “on”, not “in” the business. Simple monthly reviews will drive key strategic decisions easily.

Dashboards allow many day-to-day activities and processes to mature and be put on “auto-pilot” so employees and managers are accountable to perform and also to improve.

Good dashboards drive Constant and Never Ending Improvement (CANI), or Kaizen, for key processes and metrics to increase quality, reduce costs and increase market share.

A well designed department dashboard can transform a mediocre manager into a good to excellent manager by creating focus, accountability and making subtle issues far more visible to all involved so corrections can be made that often linger unnoticed for years. Dashboards also allow quicker and less disruptive transitions when people leave.

Dashboards provide early warning indications of both industry (external) and company (internal) trends that might go undetected until it is too late to adjust....

Benefits of AirTight Strategic Budgeting - System #4

AirTight Strategic Budgeting develops better allocation of resources to optimize Return on Investment (ROI) based on opportunities and innovation. It is not just a cost control system/method, like most accounting departments will implement, but a strategic process that is linked directly into a Strategic Plan.

Includes all the tools needed to implement a monthly financial review process that holds everyone accountable and makes managers treat their area of the business as their own to “own results” not just activities.

Fund small projects with frugal experimentation to increase innovation then scale those that work.

Dovetail monthly and quarterly financial results with Strategic Planning goals for long-term tracking and projection and a feedback loop to improve....

We help install standard Management Systems in weeks that would normally take years for companies to evolve themselves.

Virtually every problem in any business traces back to the absence of one of Six Systems. Jim Collins in the classic book Good to Great says these systems take five to ten years to develop, even in great companies. Most businesses never develop them at all. We have developed six generic systems that can be customized for any company in weeks. These systems incorporate hundreds of proven best practices.

We are experts at finding the root causes of business problems. Often symptoms are two or more levels away from those problems and it is difficult to understand the root cause. The problem you see is almost always just a long-term effect of a missing System. We can find and plug the holes and improve performance in every area of your business. Call (508) 381-8013 for a free evaluation.

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How We Implement AirTightTM Management

The AirTight Six Systems incorporate ideas and best practices from over 1,000 books on management, business and entrepreneurship that our Founder, Bob Norton, read over his career. These were selected from three decades of experience building companies and products. AirTight structures the arts of mangement, leadership and running a business into a teachable framework with all the key management processes needed. These will distance average managers from the true "professional managers" and result in better companies and results.

The AirTight Management brand was created in 2009 by formalizing the framework and rolling together all his decades of experience and development of intellectual property into this single framework. It incorporates all the material from The CEO Boot Camp and several books on entrepreneurship, leadership and management of companies our founder wrote as well as ideas collected over thirty years of management experience.

Our Six Systems approach is more comprehensive than anything else available today because it covers all aspects of the business across all disciplines including sales, marketing, finance, product development and operations (or customer service if you prefer). Each System can be implemented and used independently.

This is not to say AirTight Management is easy to learn or simple. Nothing worthwhile ever is really. It is complex and will take years to master. There are four levels of learning and certification in each of the six Systems for a total of 24 different certifications. This is why we recommend certified experts help install these Systems.

AirTight Management is a set of these models and systems that are fully integrated into a comprehensive framework to run companies.

Having a framework, like any model, helps people learn, improve and use the thousands of ideas and best practices in the management and leadership arts and sciences. Models also allow these practices to be put into a trainable framework for people to learn in an structured way as they need each piece and develop in their own career.

Less than 1 in 100 companies will grow to $10,000,000 in sales or more. Most often this is the result of poor management and planning and the limits of the management team. The result is many founders will be replaced by professional management, companies will be sold or even shut down completely. It is impossible to "know what you don't know" and most senior managers have no one to learn from like a mentor or coach who has done it before.

Everyone needs to learn from history, science and best practices, not reinvent the wheel. Management team members will often outgrow their experience level as a company grows. When this happens they need help to break through that plateau and enter new ground. This can be done with a good coach or mentor and by using proven Systems and practices. A combination of these is the ideal and fastest way.

We have compiled and structured hundreds of best practices into the Six AirTight Management Systems to create world-class companies, so you won't have to!

The skills to run and grow a company once it reaches several million dollars are very different than the skills to start a company. AirTight Management provides a comprehensive framework to implement all the systems a company needs to break through to multi-millions in revenue, and then hundreds of millions or more.

These systems are designed for companies with at least ten employees to take them to 50, 100, 500 or even or more. All the Systems can also be applied to any department or division of a larger company. These best practices and skills are not easy to learn on the job and most are not even taught in graduate business programs. Why would you want to reinvent the wheel anyway? Learning this way would be very, very expensive and take a decade or more!

The AirTight Management Six Systems provide complete solutions to all the problems of strategy, people, management, and growth. We use a combination of training, coaching and consulting to integrate each System into your company. The implementation is designed based entirely on your staff's ability and experience for each client. Using only one or two of these methods is most often a recipe for failure as people learn different ways.

How We Do It?

If we told you we would have to kill you. Well not really because information does not equal experience and ability!Try learning to ride a bike or flying an airplane after just reading books on this. Try painting a masterpiece after reading a book on art.It is just not possible.

One Secret is deciding the exact right combination of training, coaching and consulting that is needed for a given company and team! Each implementation is designed specifically for each client's business based on where they are today.An assessment can be done in a single day to develop a plan.

Each engagement will include a combination of:

1. Training - Several methods can be used including: On-site, video and audio training. The main tool is our Video Training Library (VLT), which has over 100 videos on the Six Systems. The library has courses at all levels to train any number of individual contributors, managers and/or executives and has been developed to make implementation easier and far more cost efficient.

2. Coaching - To facilitate each person to adopt and leverage the required practices and conventions (change management)

3. Consulting - To diagnose and design a specific implementation program to adopt each System. This can take weeks or months, depending on many factors like the size and age of the company

4. Licensed tools and intellectual property - To be used internally on an ongoing basis to keep your team aligned and always improving while focused on the vision. These are included with every engagement

Without this combination of strategies cultural change almost always fails, or is suboptimal.

Generally we allow 4-8 weeks to implement each System but we will generate a customized plan for every company, situation and budget.

We will train and coach your management team to leverage each System, one at a time. This will increase their team and individual performance, and also reduce friction and stress. They will all transition over several months to a higher-performance professional management team. The Six Systems address all levels in an organization (vertically on the org chart) and across all departments (horizontally on the org chart). Each system can be used in any department or division and not in others. Whereas most standards address a narrow area of a business, like Six Sigma and ISO 9000 address quality, AirTight is a holistic and complete framework that encompasses all the needed management processes. AirTight Management is also a higher level framework that can incorporate any other systems and procedures.

We guarantee that AirTight Management practices will greatly improve your company from both a strategic and operational (execution) perspective.

These Six Systems will both save money and drive additional sales in short order. You will begin seeing results within weeks and never be able to go back to the 'old way' of doing business and managing people.

Take Action Call (508) 381-8013 to get a free consultation to address your current issues.

This is a free diagnosis with an expert consultant, not a salesperson.

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